Welcome
I’m an associate professor of history at the UC Santa Cruz specializing in the history of science, medicine, globalization, and the impacts of technological change.
My most recent book, Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science, is a revisionist history of the first era of psychedelic science. It was published by Grand Central, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, in January of 2024 and has won positive reviews in The New Yorker (“lively and engrossing”), The New York Times (“convincing… exhaustively researched”), Science (“a methodologically clever book that sheds new light on the scientific history of LSD”), and Publisher’s Weekly, which gave it a starred review. I spoke about the book with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air and with physicist Sean Carroll on his Mindscape podcast.
Read more about Tripping on Utopia here…
…or buy it from Bookshop, Hachette, Amazon, or your local bookstore.
Now available in the UK.
My first book The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade won the 2021 William H. Welch Medal from the American Society for the History of Medicine. I am currently researching two future book projects: an early modern history of the idea of technological apocalypse, and a book about the globalization of modern science, the Society for Psychical Research, and the James siblings (William, Alice, and Henry).
In addition to my academic articles, I’ve written for The Washington Post, Paris Review Daily, The Atlantic, Slate, Aeon, The Pacific Standard, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Public Domain Review, Nautilus, and Lapham’s Quarterly. You can find a full list here.
I co-founded The Appendix, a journal of experimental and narrative history (2012-15) and wrote a history blog, Res Obscura (2009-2020). It’s now a newsletter that you can subscribe to here.
I’m also currently working with a group of UCSC humanities majors on developing the Psychedelic Archive, an annotated online archive of primary sources relating to the history of psychedelics. Please get in touch if you are interested in collaborating on it.
Contact and biography
My about page is here.
Complete contact info is here.
Email: bebreen [at] ucsc [dot] edu
CV: Here (updated June 2023)
PDFs of my academic articles and chapters are available here.